PHOTOS: World's most influential businesspeople

PHOTOS: World's most influential businesspeople

Time magazine lists 100 'people who inspire us, entertain us, challenge us and change our world'. Meet 13 businesspeople who make it to the top 100 list.

Elinor Ostrom

Elinor Ostrom is an American political economist. She was awarded the 2009 Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences, which she shared with Oliver E Williamson, for her analysis of economic governance.

She was the first and the only woman to win the prize in this category. Her work is associated with the new institutional economics and the resurgence of political economy.

World's most influential businesspeople

Marc Andreessen is an American entrepreneur, investor, software engineer, and multi-millionaire. He is known as the co-author of Mosaic, the first widely-used web browser, and co-founder of Netscape Communications Corporation.

He founded and later sold the software company Opsware to Hewlett-Packard. He is also a co-founder of Ning, a company which provides a platform for social-networking websites. He is one of the directors of Facebook, eBay, and HP.

World's most influential businesspeople

Andrew Lo is a Professor of Finance at the MIT Sloan School of Management. A leading authority on hedge funds and financial engineering, he proposed the Adaptive market hypothesis.

He is the author of several academic articles in Finance and Financial economics. He is the director of MIT's Laboratory for Financial Engineering, a research associate of the National Bureau of Economic Research, a member of the NASD's Economic Advisory Board, and founder and chief scientific officer of AlphaSimplex Group, LLC.

World's most influential businesspeople

Warren Edward Buffett is an American business tycoon, investor, and philanthropist. One of the world's most successful investors, he is the chairman and CEO of Berkshire Hathaway. He is the world's third richest person in the world as of 2011.

Buffett is also a notable philanthropist, having pledged to give away 99 per cent of his fortune to philanthropic causes.

World's most influential businesspeople

Sara Blakely founded Spanx, a multi-million dollar undergarment company. She is the world's youngest self-made female billionaire. She graduated from Florida State University, with a degree in communications.

World's most influential businesspeople

Tim Cook is the CEO of Apple. Cook joined Apple in March 1998 as SVP of Worldwide Operations and also served as EVP of Worldwide Sales and Operations and was COO until he was named the CEO of Apple on August 24, 2011, succeeding Steve Jobs, who died on October 5, 2011, from pancreatic cancer.

Cook had previously served as acting CEO of Apple after Jobs began a medical leave in January 2011.

Click NEXT to read more...

Image: Apple CEO Tim Cook speaks on stage during an Apple event introducing the new iPad in San Francisco.Photographs: Robert Galbraith/Reuters.